The eighth and last of the spider’s legs is particularly treacherous because it sounds so professional. Irina wants to know what she is playing, and why not? It may seem a basic prerequisite for Irina to know exactly what she is playing. But does Juliet know what she is playing?
If you asked Juliet what she was playing, she would look quite blank. Juliet will not think in terms of playing anything at all. But Juliet will know she has to deal with an extraordinary set of circumstances: a whole host of thoughts, feelings, deeds and potential outcomes fight for her attention. Juliet must find out what is happening, discover what she is feeling, she must try to see who and what Romeo is, she must work out how to survive, she must work out what she needs, what she must prevent, she must determine what is to be lost and what is to be won. One thing is sure, Juliet will try to do many of these things, but she will perfectly achieve none of them.
Like the rest of the spider legs, ‘What I am playing’ must come from the target and not from ‘me’. But, when I try to know in advance what I am playing, I inadvertently reverse this and hitch the cart in front of the horse. In fact, if I can predict what I am playing it must imply that:
The target is somehow still.
I know what the target is.
I know how the target will react.
I come before the target.
I control the target, and not the other way round.
. . . quite a few assumptions.
To know what I must play in advance is a rehearsal-room luxury denied us in real life. The UXB expert does not choose between defusing the bomb and wanting to live. In fact even these choices evaporate in the concrete minutiae of: ‘Does this wire connect here, or not? Is this off switch a bluff, or not? Can I squint enough to keep the sun out of my eyes and still avoid the fuse, or not?’
Flux
Everything moves and changes whether we like it or not. However, we mistrust the independence of the outer world. The target has a habit of doing what it likes, and we don’t like that very much. We cannot change this law of flux, but we can deny this unpopular aspect of reality. We may fantasise that the world is still, when it is not. We can choose how we interpret what we see, so we can pretend the world doesn’t change. This mechanism may be unconscious, but it motors us whenever we ask what we are playing – without reference to the target.
Knowing and playing
The problem with knowing what you are playing is that often it doesn’t work. We can know what we are playing till we are blue in the face, and still feel dead. The difficulty is that the real world rarely lets us do or ‘play’ exactly what we want. Life is one long improvisation. Juliet can plan and plan what she wants to play, but plans never quite work because all plans are ultimately dependent on the outside world. And reality is full of surprises.
We must all have suffered from the collapse of the prepared speech: ‘Oh yes! I’m going to tell him exactly what I think of him. I have the full list here. I’ll begin by saying x, and then I’ll go on to y, and finish him off with z.’ And when the time comes, you march into his office, fix him in the eye, and surprisingly but inevitably, ‘It wasn’t at all how I expected it would be!’
It is not so much how you feel inside that is different. Both he and the room look completely different. It is in the specific and concrete targets that the ghastly metamorphosis seems to have taken place. The office is different. His voice is different. His face is different. Your thoughts are different. Your words all seem hideously different. The rehearsed speech vanishes, and only a few tattered phrases get blown about. ‘It just wasn’t like I expected it to be at all!’ But the more the stakes go up, the less things turn out as anticipated. This surprise that reality is other than expected is weirdly tenacious.
Target-free hell
‘I don’t know what I’m playing’ has the same structure as the other seven spider legs. The expression endangers the actor by erasing the actor’s only source of energy. Again one ‘know’ and two ‘I’s. Our precious attention spills once more down the double drain of identity and control.
Playing may seem like a target-free verb. It has a ring of self-absorption. That is until we actually look at a child playing. The child is absorbed not inwardly but in the bucket and sand. Even when absent, distracted or paranoid we are still rearranging events in our fantasies, we are always on a target. ‘Playing’ can only ever exist in a context. The idea that I could know ‘what I am playing’ irrespective of who or what I am trying to change is plausible rubbish. Trying to know what I am playing without giving primacy to the target will always block the actor.
We can never know what we are playing until we know who or what we are playing to. We can do nothing at all out of a context.
Only a fantasy is controllable.
Rules
It is sad when an actor says: ‘But if she plays that, then I can’t play this.’ The answer is: ‘Yes, you’re right, but can’t you play something new that you haven’t planned, something that arises from this new event?’
Of course it is only easy to do this when the working relationship is good. Sometimes such openness can be intimidating. Freedom corrupted is anarchy.
If the actor is worried by sudden big changes on stage it will cause fear and blindness. Every performance needs rules; otherwise independence will stifle freedom. The actor needs to feel sure of certain parameters in order to be free to see. For example, Irina will of course need to know in advance where her balcony is, but she does not need to know exactly where Romeo will come from. She may need to know exactly where he will be standing at certain given moments, or she may not. However, if Irina plans precisely how she will play each and every line then she will probably block herself. Certainly if she wants to know what Romeo is going to play on each line then she will block herself – such towering structures must collapse and suffocate her.
Irina should give herself rules, but not too many. There should be only enough rules to empower all the actors to see something new in the moment. This takes not only trust, but also a lot of practical application. Sensible rehearsal decides what can be changed and what cannot be changed. It is prudent to fix in advance what must be predictable and what must remain unpredictable.
Total freedom is a wonderful ideal but we do not live in an ideal world. Indeed if everything is unpredictable, we may become afraid, and when we are afraid, we rely on things that are familiar, however useless they may be. This may explain the irony that excessively unstructured performances seem so predictable. There must be some structure, but we have to keep a cool eye on it, because excessive structure will also make a performance seem dead. Polar opposites can look very similar – no structure and too much structure can amount to the same thing. The anarchist and the reactionary have more in common than either would care to admit.
The big question is ‘How much structure do I need?’ And the answer is that there is no absolute answer. We must judge for ourselves and accept that some days we trust more than others. Trust cannot be manufactured.
We can no more force ourselves to trust than to be present, or to forgive. Forcing aggravates all block, so it is destructive to insist: ‘Be open!’ or ‘Be present!’ or ‘Trust!’ Somewhere we have to see that trust is like grace. We cannot demand these gifts, but they are freely given. Our choice is to refuse them, which we do much of the time.
Above all, the atmosphere of the rehearsal must be safe, so that the performance may seem dangerous. If the atmosphere of the rehearsal has been dangerous, then the resulting performance will seem tediously safe. We all lose with Fear.
Structure and control
Say Irina decides that Juliet is trying to defend herself against Romeo’s advances. She may have given herself a target, but this still gives Irina only one thing to play – there is no inherent development.
Let Irina think less about what she is playing, and see more how the target shifts. For example, at the beginning of the scene Irina may see a Romeo she must get to leave the orchard and by the end of the scene she may see a Romeo who must stay. Perhaps Juliet starts by seeing a potential rapist and ends up seeing a son who must be mothered. Perhaps she begins by seeing a Romeo who is bright, strong and deep, and ends the scene less sure, or vice versa.
We can have a lot of ideas in rehearsal, some better than others. But the advantage of the above ideas is that at least they take the form of paths. They give Irina a journey from the beginning of the scene till the end, and a journey takes us from seeing one thing to seeing another. Through rehearsal and performance Irina will discard these voyages for others that live more, but they are at least voyages and not states. For if the scene does not develop, it is not a scene at all. Though Godot never arrives, Vladimir and Estragon still develop. And even Godot develops – from their point of view.
Development is unavoidable and stasis cannot exist: even stagnant water teems with microactivity.
A digression: the death of structure
Structure is dead theory, but, like every institution, it envies us and wants to live. Every structure has the inherent tendency to choke the life that created it, like a delinquent robot. Structure has a bad memory and always forgets that it is provisional. Aping us that live, it also wants to be needed, but structure is as dead as a bandage, and its contract as temporary.
Structures like those for Juliet above may be used to underpin the rehearsal. But the acting will be more liberated, if, with trust, these structures are gradually dismantled. If bit by bit these decisions are digested into the stakes that Juliet sees, then Irina will start to see in her partner and all the other externals, a shifting, ambivalent and highly specific set of targets. A set of targets that propel, impel and compel Irina into free and vital performance.
Accepting ignorance
Even Juliet cannot fully define what Juliet is ‘playing’. Because whatever we think we are doing, we are always doing something else as well. Not only can we never fully know all the reasons why we do something, but also we can never be certain of the full meaning of what we do. A word is largely out of control, but we use words readily. If we paused to think of all the possible meanings of what we say, we would never say anything.
I may use a word and expect it to mean one thing, and in fact the hearer believes I mean something else. That is obvious. What is less obvious is that I may use a word and remain unaware that I mean something else by it as well.
So it is clear that much of what Juliet says is not fully understood by Romeo. But Juliet will not understand all that Juliet says either. And this apparent complication is of great use to Irina. For at times of stress we can speak better than we know. Like the road accident that summons us into presence, the soaring stakes can spontaneously release vocabulary, imagery, ideas and feelings that we never knew we had. As we have seen, the cosmic immensity of Juliet’s ‘boundless sea’ will astonish Romeo. But it may also surprise Juliet.
We cannot see the full significance of what we say or do. Many things about ourselves we can never know. Nor can we ever know for certain all the consequences of what we do. Nor can we ever be absolutely sure of the story we are telling, because what appears to be a single story is always many stories. To be truly responsible we have to admit of our ignorance.
Even when perfectly tied to the target, a rigid plan of ‘What am I playing?’ is best thrown away. Otherwise it might delude us that we fully know what we are doing or that we know what Time holds in store.